So, my old employer Kuju Entertainment, best known for games like Battalion Wars for Gamecube and Crush for PSP, has been rebranding its various UK studios under slightly wacky new names, in order to better describe and differentiate the kind of games they make. And it's an interesting idea.

Actually, I remember some earlier branding efforts in the late '90s, when the company was called Simis - at one point, Glass Ghost was an alternate name for the company, actually. Anyhow, earlier this year, Crush developer Kuju Brighton became Zoe Mode, a personification of a casual/mainstream oriented, innovative worldview, or just a girl with her tongue sticking out, depending on who you believe.

And just the other week, Kuju Sheffield morphed into Chemistry, a new, kinda techy brand - the owners announced that they were "...at the same time giving the studio more autonomy as it specializes in games created using Epic’s Unreal Engine." And the folks at Kuju sent us something fun to celebrate the rebranding:

In the immortal words of Rolf Harris - can you tell what it is yet?

Yep, it's a volumetric flask with the Chemistry logo/URL on it.

Studio and/or image rebranding like this is something that fellow UK developer Blitz Games has also been experimenting with - they created the Volatile Games division to get away from their family-friendly image, in order to do titles such as (the not very well-received, woops!) Reservoir Dogs. In Kuju's case, it's a bit cleaner, though - branding each studio separately as a specialist in a particular technology or game style.

Anyhow, I believe Jon Jordan is going to be interviewing the Chemistry folks for his Euro Vision Gamasutra column in the near future, so it'll be interesting to see what they think about the name change. In the meantime, Photoshop fiends can feel free to try to undistort the reflection of me in the Chemistry [EDIT: volumetric flask, thanks maybecca!] to work out whether I have any clothes on.